Written off as an absolute failure, MKR has copped a series of humiliating blows this week thanks to a trend filtering through a lot of shows, says James Weir.

TV

How MKR became ‘dead in the water’

by James Weir

9th Feb 2020 7:36 AM
| Updated:
1:56 PM

You know a TV show is dead in the water when people would literally rather watch footage of public transport.

That's what happened to My Kitchen Rules this week when it returned to humiliating ratings. Its Monday night premiere pulled in just 517,000 people in capital cities and by Tuesday it sank to 402,000. Meanwhile, Married At First Sight premiered to 1,154,000. The final punch in the guts for MKR? Great Australian Railway Journeys over on SBS pulled in more viewers than the former juggernaut.

What is Great Australian Railway Journeys? From what I gather, it's basically just some British guy who catches a train around Australia. It's a step above the "slow TV" movement where people tune in to watch a train slowly roll through the countryside for eight hours. Yep, it's actually a thing.

Maybe that's how Gladys Berejiklian can get some money back on those old-timey trams no one asked for. None of us want to ride on them because it's not the 1940s. But she could strap a GoPro to the front and sell the footage to Seven to replace MKR with. It's a win for Sydney and a win for Seven and a win for us because apparently that's what we want to watch.

We've seen lots of insane stuff on MAFS over the years - cheating, a mild-choking, an attempted glassing. But we've never seen full-blown sex acts. You know something's inappropriate when even MAFS producers draw a line.

People don't want hook ups with their cook ups! The only cheating scandals we want on MKR involve someone putting laxatives in another team's baked quail.

All these TV shows are becoming the same and it's hard to tell them apart. MKR is morphing into MAFS with its sexiness and drunken dinner parties. Pretty soon Survivor will also probably introduce some kind of drunken tribal circle where someone gets a coconut thrown at their head.

"Any minute there's going to be sex on Survivor - some of those people are very, very attractive," columnist and author Kerri Sackville said on the Not Here To Make Friends podcast. And she's right - this week there was a wrestling challenge on Survivor that viewers compared to porn. If you missed it, I can send you my screenshots.

Honestly, I’ll probably start watching survivor now.

Anyway, Kerri was a guest on the podcast with Sam Dastyari and we were talking about all these reality shows becoming the same and how they should just be rolled into one so we can save time.

"I do think we can bring them all together," she said. "What we need to do is get all the MAFS couples onto the Survivor island. And then the MKR people come in and they cook them a meal. And they're all starving so, whatever the food is, they just think it's fantastic - so no one's crying which means they have to create drama in other ways."

Even Dancing With The Stars, which returns tonight, is cashing in by casting one of MAFS' old cheaters.

I just hope Great Australian Railway Journeys doesn't buckle to the trend and introduce a sex scandal. No one wants to see that.

More screenshots of the Survivor porn from my archives.

IT'S HARD TO RESPECT A BUSINESSMAN ON A RAZOR SCOOTER

In big cities around Australia, professionals and business executives are whizzing around on Razor scooters and we're all pretending like that's normal. It's not. I can't respect a businessman on a scooter - it's like a visual oxymoron.

Someone who's loving the scooter trend is Deborra-Lee Furness. She has been whizzing around Manhattan on a scooter for the past few months and I'm just obsessed with it. I've even set up a Google alert for "Deb Lee Furness scooter" so I don't miss an update.

Whenever I'm feeling down, I just scroll through photos of Mrs Hugh Jackman hooning around the streets of SoHo and all is right in the world again.

Me leaving work early before my boss notices.

DIGGING THROUGH THE MAFS REJECT BIN

About 15,000 Aussies applied to be on Married At First Sight this year and only 20 were successfully recruited into the mess. This begs the question: Where the hell are these 14,980 rejected applicants and who the hell are they?

I've launched a Freedom Of Information request to get to the bottom of this and we're slowly getting answers. If you or someone you know was rejected, please get in touch.

You'd think producers would love to throw an asexual person in the mix. Then again, producers probably realised halfway through the interview process that - given this is basically a show about horny people cheating on each other - they probably wouldn't provide the level of drama required.

On tonight's episode of the podcast, we'll hear from a man who is attracted to guys and girls but wanted MAFS producers to pair him with a wife.